When you first start out in business, Sage 50 can be the perfect solution. However as your business grows you might find that it is no longer the right Sage accounting software for you.

It’s important that you choose software which will work hard for your company, increasing productivity and helping you with your everyday business transactions. When you need more than just accounting, look no further than Sage 200.

Sage 200 can bring together so many elements of your business model that you will wonder how you managed without. Here’s just a few of the things it can help you with:

- Finances

- Customer relations

- Processes

- Sales and services

When companies start out they typically have low working capital, and are thinking of the immediate rather than building a scalable model for growth further down the line. As a result they’ll tend to invest in the bare minimum in terms of software and supplies. As the company takes off, they find that the basics which were once perfect are now beginning to struggle. They will also be unable to perform some of the more advanced functionality they might now require.

Sage 50

Sage 50 is the small business Sage accounting software which many businesses use to get started. However, it can struggle to cope with your growing business as it was originally designed as a single user system, so you may begin to run into problems as your company grows in size.

Sage 50 is for companies working in one location, who want a one off software cost to get them started. You might now be operating from multiple workstations and from different locations, which means you would run into complications when looking to run your Sage accounting software out of more than one location.

Sage 50 works well until you exceed 100,000 transactions, when you might find the database becomes less reliable. It might sound like a lot, but it begins to add up quickly.

You might need to upgrade if you’re looking for more:

- Reliability

- Scalability

- Accessibility

- Capacity

- Accuracy

Growth

As a company grows, they’re likely to take on more staff. It makes sense – with a larger work load you will need more manpower to complete the necessary work. However, what might be less obvious is that with this growth you might also need to make some changes to the tools available. This will help current staff work more effectively so that you might not need to take on as many members of staff or take on new staff to focus on other areas of your business. This will save you money on project costs and increase productivity.

Sage 200

The natural upgrade path from your Sage accounting software is Sage 200. While it will require training for staff to get used to the changes, it will be easier to pick up than an entirely new product as the fundamentals and layout are similar. There is additionally a far increased functionality, and some new systems which allow you to access data on the move, from different locations, and with more users.

Some of the benefits of migrating your data from Sage 50 to Sage 200 include:

- Payment Solutions Integration. This allows you to record payments next to transactions securely. By combining this functionality, productivity is increased, and the chances of human error reduced.

- Sage 50 Data Conversion allows you to transfer your data across quickly and efficiently. Alternately, you can continue to run data on Sage 50 as an archive.

- Built for multiple users, while Sage 50 is only really suitable for up to ten users, you can use Sage 200 with up to 50 users, supporting the natural growth of your business.

- Sage 200 CRM can hugely improve your customer service by keeping all the relevant information in one place. It can help with customer retention and cross-selling, but we’ll be talking more about this later in our series.